Defenders of Secrets, Unite!

By MOTOKO RICH

Published: June 26, 2007

They have waited two long years, and now they have only 24 days to go. As the diehard fans of Harry Potter count the minutes until they can get their hands on ''Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,'' the seventh and final installment in the monumentally successful series by J. K. Rowling, they are engaging in a frenzy of speculation and rumor-mongering about what will happen to their beloved characters.

Predictions are flying across the Web and out of bookstores, where titles like ''Mugglenet.com's What Will Happen in Harry Potter 7,'' ''The End of Harry Potter?'' and ''The Great Snape Debate'' spew theories about who will die, who will get together with whom, and who is really good or evil.

At the same time, with little more than three weeks to go before ''Deathly Hallows'' goes on sale at 12:01 a.m. on July 21, some people claiming to have actual knowledge of the book's plot are posting ostensible spoilers online. At one site, for instance, what appears to be a page from a manuscript appears, showing one paragraph outlined in red, suggesting that one of the most morally enigmatic characters in the series dies in the final book, with a few bars from the chorus of ''Tarzan Boy'' by Baltimora playing on an endless loop in the background.

And just last week, a self-proclaimed hacker calling himself Gabriel said he had broken into the computers of Bloomsbury, the series's British publisher, and discovered the identities of two characters killed at the end of the book, though the claim was widely discounted.

While fans take endless delight in spinning their own theories, bringing Talmudic fervor to the analysis of clues dropped throughout the previous books and in interviews with Ms. Rowling, they tend to oppose spoilers violently.

At The Leaky Cauldron (leakynews.com), the site's hosts have posted a policy on spoilers: ''DON'T DO IT.''

''We just don't want someone taking what J. K. Rowling has earned away from her, which is the right to tell us where these mysteries end,'' said Melissa Anelli, the Leaky Cauldron's Webmaster, in a telephone interview. ''She's worked really hard for 17 years on this series, and it's about time she reaps the satisfaction of bringing the culmination of her story to the fans herself.''

In a posting dated May 14 on Ms. Rowling's own Web site, jkrowling.com, the author thanks Ms. Anelli for The Leaky Cauldron's spoiler policy, and added her own plea: ''I want the readers who have, in many instances, grown up with Harry, to embark on the last adventure they will share with him without knowing where they are going,'' she wrote.

Attempts to spoil the ending are not new, of course. Four years ago, before the publication of ''Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,'' the fifth book in the series, The Daily News bought a copy of the book at a Brooklyn health food store four days before publication and ran a graphic image showing two pages of the book. Ms. Rowling sued The Daily News for $100 million, and the suit was settled out of court.

Hosts of MuggleNet.com, another of the biggest Potter fan sites, learned about the death of Sirius Black, Harry's godfather, a few weeks before ''Order of the Phoenix'' was published, when someone sent in some scanned pages pilfered from a manuscript. And before ''Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,'' the sixth book in the series, was published two years ago, someone reportedly working on a Malaysian military base e-mailed a summary, the first page of every chapter and the whole final chapter to The Leaky Cauldron, revealing that Albus Dumbledore, the headmaster of Hogwarts, the boarding school where Harry and his friends train in wizardry, dies at the end of the book.

''There are usually a few people who get their hands on a book and get some rush in spoiling the details for us,'' said Emerson Spartz, MuggleNet's founder and Web master. ''They get some sick satisfaction that they're sticking it to the man.''

At least one cynical fan sees the current crop of spoilers as a ruse by the publishers to increase sales.

''I think it was a ploy by someone inside to get more hype about the book and get more money off of it,'' Joy Viceroy, 16, said of last week's Gabriel incident. Ms. Viceroy, an avid fan of the series who has read each book multiple times, was waiting in line on Saturday at a public library branch near Cleveland to board the Harry Potter Knight Bus, a purple triple-decker brought in by Scholastic, Ms. Rowling's United States publisher, to stoke up prepublication fervor.

Just in case, Ms. Viceroy didn't look at the hacker's posting. ''It might be wrong, but I hate spoilers,'' she said.

Still, like many other fans, Ms. Viceroy has her theories. ''I think Harry is going to live,'' she said.

In that she is joined by the hosts of MuggleNet, whose book, ''What Will Happen in Harry Potter 7'' has spent 19 weeks on the New York Times Paperback Children's Best Seller list. ''We're absolutely convinced that Harry Potter is not going to die,'' said Mr. Spartz, who founded the site when he was 12. (He's now 20 and will be a junior at the University of Notre Dame in the fall.)

Bookmakers in Britain, meanwhile, stopped taking bets on Harry's fate earlier this month because too many people were betting that the boy wizard would die in the seventh book.

''I think that it's an innate human need to be curious about what's going to happen,'' Mr. Spartz said.

Scholastic and Bloomsbury have taken elaborate security steps with booksellers, libraries and distributors to ensure that leaks that have happened in the past don't occur this time. As for predictions, said Lisa Holton, president of Scholastic's trade and book fairs division, ''everyone is entitled to their theory. It's part of the fun.''

The predictions can be found everywhere, from the fan sites and chat boards to political and academic blogs. The intensity of thought is evident, with predictions based on minute details gleaned from close readings of the texts.

Dave Kopel, research director of the Independence Institute, a libertarian research group based in Golden, Colo., has posted a 16-page thesis titled ''Severus Snape: The Unlikely Hero of Harry Potter Book 7,'' in which he predicts that Professor Snape, whose allegiances have been the subject of fierce debate, will sacrifice himself to destroy Lord Voldemort, the unequivocal villain of the series.

In a posting filled with quotations and page references, Mr. Kopel outlines his case. ''That's part of Rowling's genius -- there are a lot of clues hidden in plain sight,'' he said in a telephone interview. ''But it's hard to tell which ones are that and which ones are just detractors.''

John Granger, a professor of Latin and English at the Valley Forge Military Academy & College in Wayne, Pa., has written two books about the series and edited a third called ''Who Killed Albus Dumbledore'' that is filled with predictions.

He also runs a discussion group at HogwartsProfessor.com. ''I've seen really intelligent, really literate women and men discuss these points and provide more than cogent arguments that Snape is X, Y or Z, and they all make sense in terms of all the clues she's given in the book,'' Mr. Granger said. ''This has probably been the most fun that intelligent people can have with their clothes on in the 21st century.''